University Challenge

Critical Issues for Teaching and Learning

Tony Harland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367443085
• eBook ISBN: 9781000025781
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

University Challenge: Critical Issues for Teaching and Learning offers a nuanced and critical reading of university teaching, particularly the pressures under which academics in neoliberal, mass higher education must operate.

It provides exciting thinking about slow pedagogies, powerful knowledge, the assessment arms race and the concept of vanilla teaching. Eight challenges currently encountered by those who teach in higher education are carefully examined. These include: teaching to meet all students' needs; assessment and grading; learning to teach; and space and time in academic life. The research that underpins this work came from an international study and a conceptual re-evaluation of current practices, theories and the values of teaching and higher education. The author brings a rich understanding of university teaching as a critical and values-laden process, exploring important debates about the extent and limits of teachers' and students' responsibility in teaching and learning.

The conceptual foundations provide a distinctive angle on some of the persistent problems which dog twenty-first-century academics working in marketised, mass higher education. This book will appeal to university teachers who wish to develop their work through scholarly enquiry and will be a resource to inform policy and management around teaching and curriculum.

1 Introduction

Unfamiliar academic territory?

A university teacher, by and large, takes up his or her first post as a lecturer without the required knowledge and skills to teach effectively at this level. Certainly, within Western higher education systems, most will have had extensive research training and may bring with them some limited experience of tutoring, laboratory demonstrating or the odd guest lecture carried out during postgraduate study. Of course, all will have been learners and exposed to lots of different teachers over many years, and so have images and models of teaching that each carry with them. These experiences are invaluable as an initial guide to practice, and it is probably the models and some of the limited experiences that allow the new lecturer to get through the first weeks and months of his or her first semester without catastrophe (even though it is likely to be stressful and nerve-wracking at times). Such an outcome can be viewed as a triumph for the university because it essentially succeeds and students get an education of some sort, graduate, and then leave as educated members of society. However, the idea of an inexperienced and ‘unqualified’ lecturer has long been open to criticism, and concerns about quality and teaching skills have been addressed in different ways in the last few decades by universities and governments worldwide.

Many institutions provide professional training through academic development for teaching, and new lecturers are seen as a key group for this support. There is no doubt that it helps individuals and also their students, but the reality is that for most lecturers, the early years are characterised by doing enough to get by, a narrow focus on the structures of the subject and how to get the required basic and theoretical knowledge across to students in a variety of settings. This early period of teaching is typically characterised by trial and error, and is an experience that becomes a seminal influence on the formation of professional values. In other words, what is learned in the early stages may stay with an academic throughout his or her career. In addition, the many other pressures of academic life leave little time for exploring the wider aspects and responsibilities of teaching. Naturally such generalisations as this must be read with caution. Some staff make the transition to academic life quickly and become skilful teachers with clear ideas about what they want to achieve for students. In contrast, others do stay more narrowly focused as subject specialists and may have very different ideas to their immediate colleagues about what it means to be a university lecturer. However, the academic community can learn from all these teachers.

The very fact that practices can vary so widely between individuals, and that those with vastly different skill sets can all have successful careers, is one of the interesting peculiarities of a higher education system in which research dominates and is nearly always valued more than teaching (at least in the research-intensive higher education sector). If we accept the position that a successful researcher who is also a ‘good enough’ teacher, can progress to the top of the academic ranks, then this presents universities with both practical and ethical challenges. For example, the quality of a student’s learning experiences may be quite random and depend on which type of lecturer he or she meets in a course of study. Or it may be that a brilliant teacher with ‘good enough’ research is not considered seriously for a high-ranking position. At the same time, it is also clear that within the wide range of skills that can be found, there are many lecturers who excel in both teaching and research, and this could be seen as the benchmark by which the sector can make judgements about the potential and possibilities for academic work. In this formation of excellent academic practice, it has long been understood that the relationship between subject research and teaching is typically strong (Boice 1992), and so offers the opportunity to link research and teaching skills to enhance all academic responsibilities through self-study and systematic enquiry.

There is a perennial problem that hinders the natural relationship between teaching and research. When the tasks of teaching or research are isolated, measured and then rewarded, research tends to take precedence because its quality can be determined relatively easily. Measuring teaching quality is highly subjective and always difficult. For example, if the outcome of good teaching is good student learning, should ‘learning’ not be the most important criterion for measuring teaching quality? If this assertion is accepted, then determining any impact on learning is not easy because each teacher typically only plays a small part in the complex student experience (even though brief encounters can be highly influential). In this context, what the teacher does can seldom be extracted and measured objectively.

So how can one maintain that a lecturer excels in teaching? Often claims about ‘worth’ or ‘quality’ need to be made by the lecturers themselves in order to convince someone else, and these claims always rely on a range of proxy measures of quality (Harland 2012). At the same time, when it comes to our colleagues, we tend to ‘know’ who the good lecturers are. Working alongside someone who has a clear commitment to teaching and to the student learning experience is obvious enough, but still difficult to evidence in a way that would satisfy a contemporary quality assurance process. I would argue that what all ‘good’ teachers have in common is a genuine interest in students and a commitment to working hard over a career to meet the challenges that teaching brings. Measuring these attributes is another matter entirely.

Colleagues across my university, and those I have worked with around the world, are pretty good subject teachers. Some are excellent. A few could do with some help and guidance. Often, those I work with simply enjoy conversation and being exposed to new ideas. What I have not seen since I was an undergraduate student in the early 1980s is the stereotype of a ‘hopeless’ university teacher. As a science student, I was taught by a lecturer who would mumble facts that he read word for word from ancient faded hand-written acetates that, when projected, were unreadable on the screen. What I had to do to survive his teaching was buy the textbook and teach myself the subject. None of my fellow students made an issue of this experience although we used to compare the lecturer to the others that we had and, of course, make gentle fun of him behind his back, as youngsters do (usually through what we regarded as harmless impressions). Yet none of us ever missed one of his lectures. About twelve years later I was working in another university and was told a story about a lecturer that a department eventually decided was not cut out for teaching after all and had to be ‘removed from duty’. And that’s about the sum of all my genuine teacher-horror stories.

Despite the lack of initial or continuing training, very few teachers end up incompetent. I have worked professionally with vast numbers of lecturers in their classrooms and lecture theatres, mostly in universities in the UK, New Zealand and Malaysia. Although I have never seen the ‘hopeless’ teacher in all my encounters, what I have predominantly come across is teachers who want to do a reasonable job, have a sense of their limitations and want to improve their practice. Of course, these aspirations are often why I am invited to work with them in the first place, and so they may not be representative of the overall population. However, I have never seen any evidence to suggest that my impressions of teaching quality are not representative (although I cannot discount this possibility). The point I am trying to make here is that university teaching, at least in the research-led sector in which I work, generally ‘succeeds’ to a certain point.

I am always positive when a colleague seeks help with teaching and my role, as an academic developer, is to assist his or her personal exploration of practice. Such enquiries always lead to some change and I am convinced that this form of professional learning makes a significant difference to teaching and often the difference between being good enough and being outstanding. I also see the connection between buying that textbook to teach myself science, and the university lecturer systematically inquiring into his or her work. Both can be positive learning experiences and self-study can become part of fabric of teaching. In my present institution, lecturers get much support from both formal academic development and from their peers, and I feel that I would have learned much better when I was a science student with both the textbook and a teacher. My arguments throughout the book bear this in mind. Teachers are important and I would always encourage anyone to discuss what they read about teaching with colleagues and students where appropriate.

One of my concerns, and the main motivation for writing this book, is that most effort still goes into learning how to teach a subject and how the curriculum might be organised in terms of lectures, tutorials, laboratories, clinics and so on. This focus seems to be well established and without doubt subject knowledge and what should be taught are always going to be paramount to university lecturing. I would not dispute this and lecturers and students alike have great attachment to their subject. Being up to date with the latest thinking, bringing one’s research findings into the classroom, understanding what is foundational to the discipline, and working out how to progressively teach complex theories, all sustain higher education. However, there is so much more to teaching than the subject and although it is foundational for everything that might follow, the university experience for students is shaped in many ways that transcend and go beyond subject. It is doubtful if my ‘mumbling’ science lecturer ever considered how he might support critical thinking, teaching all students in his classes, or even what a learning outcome was. In contemporary higher education, these components of practice, and many other professional requirements, are more commonly expected.

Quite a number of my colleagues have well-thought-out teaching philosophies, clear purposes for what they are doing and a good understanding of the outcomes they seek for student learning. They have considered the nature of a university education and can articulate their ideas and contrast these to other forms of higher education. Yet at the same time these academics face other work pressures, although I suspect none are truly fatal to the teaching project. To give one example, I worked with an award-winning lecturer whose students (and myself) deemed to be quite inspirational. I once asked her to justify her assessment practices and explain why students were graded in a certain way. She was hard pressed to answer. The assessment system she was using had been in place for many years and been adopted and accepted without any serious thought about its impact on student learning. This was something of importance to her but she simply had not had the time to address it.

So, there are challenges or critical issues to confront, for some if not all of us, and whether or not these are embraced will always be contingent on perceived or prioritised professional needs and values. Universities complicate the matter because they accept diversity in subject teaching and tend to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1. Introduction: Unfamiliar academic territory?
• 2. Assessing and grading
• 3. Teaching to meet all students’ learning needs
• 4. Space and time in academic life
• 5. Teaching critic and conscience of society
• 6. Critical thinking
• 7. Learning to teach
• 8. Being accountable for students’ learning
• 9. Competitive students
• 10. Other challenges
• References
• Index